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The phenomenon of selfies has been studied for several years, but it is only gaining momentum: this year, according to Yahoo's forecast, the number of photos with the hashtag Selfie on Instagram alone may double. The number of startups exploiting the need of users to take mobile self-portraits is already measured in dozens (the most striking examples are Snapchat and Shots of Me), and users themselves are finding more and more amazing niches, massively filming themselves in cemeteries, with the homeless and after sex. The real boom of selfies, which, it would seem, we have already experienced, is only expected.
Slon has compiled the main theories to explain the success of this social phenomenon.
Theory 1. The endless evolution of the narcissist
Clive Thompson, author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better, believes that selfies are just the next level of development for human narcissism. This is not the evolution of a person and his ideas about himself and his role in society, this is the technological evolution of a natural human need, which earlier we simply perceived less acutely due to the lack of available channels for the dissemination of information.
The evolution of narcissism will continue, Thompson is sure. One of its next levels is services that guarantee the preservation of our visual images for centuries, which in the future will radically change the methods of anthropological, historical and sociological research.
Theory 2. Man as a media
Natural narcissism is too simple and insufficient to explain the phenomenon, according to Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. He offers to look at this phenomenon through the prism of the technological revolution and its consequences for the human brain. Narcissism by itself did not lead to an epidemic of photographic self-portraits in the 20th century, although the popularity of everyday photography was very high; Even lomography did not form the culture of selfies, although the principle of an unusual angle fully implied self-photography.
The Internet and mobile phones have radically changed the photographer's sense of self and thinking, Carr believes: if earlier the main motive for him was memory, now a person with a smartphone has become one of the elements of the global information market. Memory retention was replaced by the production of news to oneself.
The researcher cites survey data that show that active Instagram users perceive the service's feed as a source of news, and selfies in this case are only an extremely personal level of the news agenda. “This is functional narcissism that the average user needs to be heard and recognized. Selfies are just the most convenient form for this, allowing you to quickly integrate yourself into the global data flow”.
Theory 3. The desire for self-editing
Dr. James Kilner, a neuroscientist at University College London, has conducted research that shows that the ever-growing attraction of humanity to selfies is due to the fact that we know very little and do not understand our own face. Selfies are a tool of internal research that can be considered complete only after it has been published: a selfie helps us to “fake ourselves”, to edit our image to match our own perception.
In the scientist's experiment, the subjects were shown different versions of the same selfie with varying degrees of editing using filters. The editing was done by specialists in appearance and make-up: they created "an extremely attractive image of the hero" and "simply attractive". When asked to select the original, the majority pointed to the version that reflected their most attractive appearance.
Theory 4. How to "sell" yourself to society
Another concept is proposed by Jennifer Oullet, author of the book "Me, Myself and Why: Searching for the Science of Self": selfies are a virtual analogue of material totems (for example, travel souvenirs, posters, favorite toys, postcards, etc .), the purpose of which is to connect our inner world with the outer one. This is one of the forms of personal performance, a statement of self-identity, the ability to "package" yourself and your world in the right wrapper, even if in reality it is completely different.
The same mechanism operates here as in the advertising market: texts are perceived worse on social networks than photographs of objects and processes. In the world of all-conquering advertising and total marketing, a person begins to consider himself a social product and, often not noticing this, is looking for opportunities to “sell” himself to society. Mankind has not yet invented a more effective tool than a selfie to implement the “seem rather than be” strategy, Oullet believes.
Theory 5. Humanization of technology
Bruce Hood explains the phenomenon of selfies in his book "The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity" by his desire to humanize the online world, calling this process "new subjectivity." The same process is responsible, in his opinion, for the boom of social networks and photo services (Instagram and followers), but the selfie is its absolute, final and purest manifestation.
Various technologies (transport, household appliances, etc.) have long been an addition to life and everyday life, and not an integral part of them. Today, a person is extremely attached to technology, he literally lives and sleeps with them, smartphones and gadgets are becoming an artificial extension of the human body. “People are looking for a comfortable mode of coexistence with available technologies, forming with their help and within them an endless stream of human faces. This is how an empty house settles in, when the hostess arranges photographs of the family on the shelves. By the way, the desire to give robots humanoid forms is also part of this process. Selfie turned out to be the most accessible and prompt option for humanizing the technological world: your face is always with you.
Theory 6. Visual communication
And Pamela Rutledge, a well-known psychologist and director of the Media Psychology Research Center, believes that the key word explaining the phenomenon of selfies is not identification, but communication. A selfie is a message, engaging in dialogue, approving or discussing one's actions. Visual communication becomes defining, pictures speak more than words, and are better at pushing for some kind of reaction. A portrait of his own with a certain facial expression and in a certain context, says Rutledge, can convey more than two paragraphs of text.
Young people were looking for a convenient and prompt way of quick communication, which would at the same time clearly emphasize their individuality (which is difficult to achieve, for example, in a chat, if you do not switch to a completely expressive level of communication ), and they found it.
***
“Users are becoming idiots. In the ancient Greek sense "
A recent study by the Georgia Institute of Technology showed what we all suspected: The most popular Instagram photos are with human faces. Faces are 38% more likely to get users' liking than pictures without faces. In addition, these photos are 32% more likely to provoke comments.
Slon asked the head of the study, Saydeh Bakshi, to comment on his findings:
The research is primarily sociological, but we also involved psychologists in the examination of its results. The conclusions we made go beyond the statistics of one social network. It seems to me that they show the general trends in the development of the Internet and user-generated content.
The selfie boom has clearly shown for the first time that the personal is becoming more important for the Internet user than the public. Measurements of user social activity in other studies support this conclusion. Concentration on personal life and on yourself, including on your life, on your environment, on your feelings and on your face, determines the bulk of the content on social networks.
On Instagram, thanks to its visual content, this trend is even more pronounced. That being said, it would be wrong to draw a hard line between the visual content of Instagram and the semantic content of Facebook and Twitter. All three social networks are strongly tied to each other, tools for simultaneous publishing create a common environment with the same principles and user preferences. The role of social networks in the self-organization of citizens, in solving important public issues, is certainly important, but polls show that the so-called complex public, social, information content occupies only 20-30% of the total content in them. Users become idiots in the ancient Greek sense, that is, more and more consciously living in isolation from public life.
Activity indices in social networks show that two years ago there was no such bias towards the personal to the detriment of the public. Photos from public events (sporting events, concerts, elections) collect 20-25% fewer responses and likes than selfies of stars and just popular users, little known outside the social network. This trend is even more noticeable in the case of information photographs of major events, disasters, mass actions - they, on average, collect 35–37% fewer likes than the same selfies and just everyday human portraits.
It is interesting to try to explain what this trend is connected with and why it has become apparent in the last two years. Moreover, it is more important now to explain not why people like to look at each other and publish their photographs, but why this natural need so easily replaced the equally natural need for social reflection. One of the most convincing versions is that social networks work in long cycles: users “gorge” on one type of content, one type of network practice, and quite quickly switch to a new one. Selfies are now at their peak, but it is quite possible that in a few years they will cease to be so popular or even become unfashionable, marginal. But this is still only a hypothesis. In the meantime, it is possible
Author: Peter Birger
Slon has compiled the main theories to explain the success of this social phenomenon.
Theory 1. The endless evolution of the narcissist
Clive Thompson, author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better, believes that selfies are just the next level of development for human narcissism. This is not the evolution of a person and his ideas about himself and his role in society, this is the technological evolution of a natural human need, which earlier we simply perceived less acutely due to the lack of available channels for the dissemination of information.
The evolution of narcissism will continue, Thompson is sure. One of its next levels is services that guarantee the preservation of our visual images for centuries, which in the future will radically change the methods of anthropological, historical and sociological research.
Theory 2. Man as a media
Natural narcissism is too simple and insufficient to explain the phenomenon, according to Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. He offers to look at this phenomenon through the prism of the technological revolution and its consequences for the human brain. Narcissism by itself did not lead to an epidemic of photographic self-portraits in the 20th century, although the popularity of everyday photography was very high; Even lomography did not form the culture of selfies, although the principle of an unusual angle fully implied self-photography.
The Internet and mobile phones have radically changed the photographer's sense of self and thinking, Carr believes: if earlier the main motive for him was memory, now a person with a smartphone has become one of the elements of the global information market. Memory retention was replaced by the production of news to oneself.
The researcher cites survey data that show that active Instagram users perceive the service's feed as a source of news, and selfies in this case are only an extremely personal level of the news agenda. “This is functional narcissism that the average user needs to be heard and recognized. Selfies are just the most convenient form for this, allowing you to quickly integrate yourself into the global data flow”.
Theory 3. The desire for self-editing
Dr. James Kilner, a neuroscientist at University College London, has conducted research that shows that the ever-growing attraction of humanity to selfies is due to the fact that we know very little and do not understand our own face. Selfies are a tool of internal research that can be considered complete only after it has been published: a selfie helps us to “fake ourselves”, to edit our image to match our own perception.
In the scientist's experiment, the subjects were shown different versions of the same selfie with varying degrees of editing using filters. The editing was done by specialists in appearance and make-up: they created "an extremely attractive image of the hero" and "simply attractive". When asked to select the original, the majority pointed to the version that reflected their most attractive appearance.
Theory 4. How to "sell" yourself to society
Another concept is proposed by Jennifer Oullet, author of the book "Me, Myself and Why: Searching for the Science of Self": selfies are a virtual analogue of material totems (for example, travel souvenirs, posters, favorite toys, postcards, etc .), the purpose of which is to connect our inner world with the outer one. This is one of the forms of personal performance, a statement of self-identity, the ability to "package" yourself and your world in the right wrapper, even if in reality it is completely different.
The same mechanism operates here as in the advertising market: texts are perceived worse on social networks than photographs of objects and processes. In the world of all-conquering advertising and total marketing, a person begins to consider himself a social product and, often not noticing this, is looking for opportunities to “sell” himself to society. Mankind has not yet invented a more effective tool than a selfie to implement the “seem rather than be” strategy, Oullet believes.
Theory 5. Humanization of technology
Bruce Hood explains the phenomenon of selfies in his book "The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity" by his desire to humanize the online world, calling this process "new subjectivity." The same process is responsible, in his opinion, for the boom of social networks and photo services (Instagram and followers), but the selfie is its absolute, final and purest manifestation.
Various technologies (transport, household appliances, etc.) have long been an addition to life and everyday life, and not an integral part of them. Today, a person is extremely attached to technology, he literally lives and sleeps with them, smartphones and gadgets are becoming an artificial extension of the human body. “People are looking for a comfortable mode of coexistence with available technologies, forming with their help and within them an endless stream of human faces. This is how an empty house settles in, when the hostess arranges photographs of the family on the shelves. By the way, the desire to give robots humanoid forms is also part of this process. Selfie turned out to be the most accessible and prompt option for humanizing the technological world: your face is always with you.
Theory 6. Visual communication
And Pamela Rutledge, a well-known psychologist and director of the Media Psychology Research Center, believes that the key word explaining the phenomenon of selfies is not identification, but communication. A selfie is a message, engaging in dialogue, approving or discussing one's actions. Visual communication becomes defining, pictures speak more than words, and are better at pushing for some kind of reaction. A portrait of his own with a certain facial expression and in a certain context, says Rutledge, can convey more than two paragraphs of text.
Young people were looking for a convenient and prompt way of quick communication, which would at the same time clearly emphasize their individuality (which is difficult to achieve, for example, in a chat, if you do not switch to a completely expressive level of communication ), and they found it.
***
“Users are becoming idiots. In the ancient Greek sense "
A recent study by the Georgia Institute of Technology showed what we all suspected: The most popular Instagram photos are with human faces. Faces are 38% more likely to get users' liking than pictures without faces. In addition, these photos are 32% more likely to provoke comments.
Slon asked the head of the study, Saydeh Bakshi, to comment on his findings:
The research is primarily sociological, but we also involved psychologists in the examination of its results. The conclusions we made go beyond the statistics of one social network. It seems to me that they show the general trends in the development of the Internet and user-generated content.
The selfie boom has clearly shown for the first time that the personal is becoming more important for the Internet user than the public. Measurements of user social activity in other studies support this conclusion. Concentration on personal life and on yourself, including on your life, on your environment, on your feelings and on your face, determines the bulk of the content on social networks.
On Instagram, thanks to its visual content, this trend is even more pronounced. That being said, it would be wrong to draw a hard line between the visual content of Instagram and the semantic content of Facebook and Twitter. All three social networks are strongly tied to each other, tools for simultaneous publishing create a common environment with the same principles and user preferences. The role of social networks in the self-organization of citizens, in solving important public issues, is certainly important, but polls show that the so-called complex public, social, information content occupies only 20-30% of the total content in them. Users become idiots in the ancient Greek sense, that is, more and more consciously living in isolation from public life.
Activity indices in social networks show that two years ago there was no such bias towards the personal to the detriment of the public. Photos from public events (sporting events, concerts, elections) collect 20-25% fewer responses and likes than selfies of stars and just popular users, little known outside the social network. This trend is even more noticeable in the case of information photographs of major events, disasters, mass actions - they, on average, collect 35–37% fewer likes than the same selfies and just everyday human portraits.
It is interesting to try to explain what this trend is connected with and why it has become apparent in the last two years. Moreover, it is more important now to explain not why people like to look at each other and publish their photographs, but why this natural need so easily replaced the equally natural need for social reflection. One of the most convincing versions is that social networks work in long cycles: users “gorge” on one type of content, one type of network practice, and quite quickly switch to a new one. Selfies are now at their peak, but it is quite possible that in a few years they will cease to be so popular or even become unfashionable, marginal. But this is still only a hypothesis. In the meantime, it is possible
Author: Peter Birger
